Surveillance II

Rand Paul suing Obama and NSA - Local 12 WKRC-TV Cincinnati - Top Stories. Privacy Scandal: NSA Can Spy on Smart Phone Data. The United States' National Security Agency intelligence-gathering operation is capable of accessing user data from smart phones from all leading manufacturers.

Top secret NSA documents that SPIEGEL has seen explicitly note that the NSA can tap into such information on Apple iPhones, BlackBerry devices and Google's Android mobile operating system. The documents state that it is possible for the NSA to tap most sensitive data held on these smart phones, including contact lists, SMS traffic, notes and location information about where a user has been.
65 Things We Know About NSA Surveillance That We Didn’t Know a Year Ago. Nadia Kayyali and Katitza RodriguezElectronic Frontier Foundation It’s been one year since the Guardian first published the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court order, leaked by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, that demonstrated that the NSA was conducting dragnet surveillance on millions of innocent people.

Since then, the onslaught of disturbing revelations, from disclosures, admissions from government officials, Freedom of Information Act requests, and lawsuits, has been nonstop. On the anniversary of that first leak, here are 65 things we know about NSA spying that we did not know a year ago: 1. We saw an example of the court orders that authorize the NSA to collect virtually every phone call record in the United States—that’s who you call, who calls you, when, for how long, and sometimes where. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14.

The FBI and NSA Hate Apple’s Plan to Keep Your iPhone Data Secret. Police Looking at Your Real-Time Web Browsing, Text Messages, Private Pics — Over 1.1 Million “Reported” Requests. WASHINGTON, DC — Police can gain access to your location, your text messages, your conversations, your real-time web browsing activity, and much more. They contacted cellphone carriers over 1.1 million times last year in order to do so, according to a report released by Edward Markey, a senator. They often get the data without a warrant depending on the carrier. It turns out that law enforcement has had access to your private data — financial records, political beliefs, info on friends and relatives, credit score, google searches, etc. — for almost a decade.
Your Online Pictures Will Be Used To Identify You On CCTV. Despite the growing criticism worldwide for the privacy violations of the NSA, the National Security Agency continues to harvest millions of images of people from the web.

These images come from the communications that the NSA intercepts through its global surveillance operation, which comes equipped with a sophisticated facial recognition program. The NSA uses a variety of data in order to fish for the images, including e-mails, text messages, social media, video conferences, and other communications. These programs have been labeled by former CIA analyst Edward Snowden, who was the first to expose the NSA privacy violations, to be grossly unregulated and unsupervised. The agency steals millions of images per day from unsuspecting citizens, including roughly 55,000 facial recognition quality images.

The NSA now considers facial images, fingerprints, and other identifiers to be just as important as written and oral communications were throughout the past.
"Giving Hypocrisy a Bad Name": NSA-Backing Senate Intel Chair Blasts CIA for Spying on Torture Probe. This is a rush transcript.

Copy may not be in its final form. NERMEEN SHAIKH: The head of the Senate Intelligence Committee harshly criticized the Central Intelligence Agency Tuesday for attempting to obstruct its investigation into the CIA’s use of torture following the 9/11 attacks. The report has yet to be released but allegedly documents extensive abuses and a cover-up by CIA officials to Congress. Senator Dianne Feinstein took to the Senate floor on Tuesday to accuse the CIA of accessing computers used by Senate staff. SEN.
» NSA Pretends To Be Facebook To Spy On The World Alex Jones. Malware can record audio and take photos of web users without their knowledge.

Steve WatsonInfowars.com March 11, 2014 The latest Snowden leaks on the NSA reveal that the spy agency is masquerading as Facebook in order to infect millions of computers around the world with malware as part of its mass surveillance program. Glenn Greenwald reported the latest information today, noting that the practice has been in operation for over ten years with the help of British and Japanese intelligence. The NSA, according to the leaks, has been distributing malware “implants” which can siphon out data from computers around the globe. The agency reportedly used a fake Facebook server as a launching pad to grab information from hard drives. The malware has also been designed to covertly record audio from a computer’s microphone and take snapshots with its webcam.
If you hate red-light cameras, you’ll really hate speeding ticket robots. STANFORD, CA—Four academics from West Point and Samford University in Alabama set out to answer a seemingly simple question: how would one write a computer program to issue speeding tickets?

After all, speed limits are fairly simple—you’re either driving faster than the posted number or you’re not. In the age of Google and its competitors making fully autonomous cars (and states passing laws to allow them), it’s not hard to imagine fully autonomous law enforcement for traffic violations, either. After all, we already have red-light cameras. “If anyone thinks it is a simple thing to do, to take a simple law [and convert it to machine-readable code], it is significantly more complicated than one thought,” Woodrow Hartzog, a law professor at the Cumberland School of Law at Samford University and one of the paper's co-authors, told Ars.

Drones. 5 Funny Ways to Protest the NSA - Part 2. Since discussing “5 Funny Ways to Contest Corporate Personhood” earlier this year, a new frightening controversy has come to our attention: the NSA.

The secretive program may do its best to fly under the radar while collecting – en masse – personal information from foreigners and U.S. citizens alike, but that hasn’t stopped concerned individuals from finding creative ways to voice their disapproval for this overdone approach to a surveillance state. Here are five funny ways NSA dissenters have found to express themselves: 1. Adopting a Highway. The Day We Fight Back: Activism Sweeps the Internet with Global Action Against Mass Surveillance.

America is still polarized over Edward Snowden and whether the newspapers that exposed the extent of NSA's vast global spying network should be lauded or condemned. Ten months later, the question on journalists' lips is whether America's most prestigious journalism prize, the Pulitzers, will honor them when the annual awards are announced Monday. For most journalists, there is no debate.
US spy leaks: How intelligence is gathered.

17 January 2014Last updated at 05:01 ET Documents leaked by whistleblower Edward Snowden suggest the US government has undertaken mass surveillance operations across the globe - including eavesdropping on US allies.

The claims have led US Senate's intelligence committee to pledge to review the way the country's biggest intelligence organisation - the National Security Agency (NSA) - undertakes surveillance. According to the leaks, what are the key methods the spy agency uses? 1.
Peeping Webcam? With NSA Help, British Spy Agency Intercepted Millions of Yahoo Chat Images. This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form. AMY GOODMAN: A new report based on top-secret documents leaked by Edward Snowden reveals the National Security Agency and its British counterpart, the Government Communications Headquarters, or GCHQ, may have peered into the lives of millions of Internet users who were not suspected of wrongdoing.

A surveillance program codenamed "Optic Nerve" compiled still images of Yahoo webcam chats in bulk and stored them in GCHQ’s databases with help from the NSA.
Threat of a 21st century gulag. Belgium-Brussels - If we are not living the 1930s of a World War “e”, mass electronic surveillance could well be the razor wire of the 21st Century Gulag. The following quote from Winston Churchill’s 1946 “Iron Curtain” speech resonates like a wakeup call: “Last time I saw it all coming, and cried aloud to my fellow countrymen and to the world, but no one paid any attention … We surely must not let that happen again.” Close attention ought to be paid to the risk of a still avoidable electronic Gulag even if it is only a remote possibility. This is why Winston Churchill and other great European leaders set up the Council of Europe in the first place, to prevent the horrors of World War II from happening again.

The Council of Europe was set up to manage risk and give early warning so that future generations would not suddenly wake up to a new Holocaust. George Orwell alerted us of the risk long ago.
Is the NSA infringing copyright. My friend and colleague Renata Avila has asked an interesting question on Twitter: “If the NSA is storing, reproducing – copying my data and works, are they violating Copyright Law?” I do not think that it has been asked before, so I am trying to tackle it today. This is actually a rather complex question for various reasons. Firstly, while we are learning quite a lot of details regarding the type of surveillance that the NSA conducts, we do not seem to have enough detail to determine whether there may be some form of copyright infringement. Secondly, we might be faced with some jurisdictional issues, as the NSA may be conducting copying of data that affects citizens of other jurisdictions, so the analysis may change from one country to the other. I’ll try to tackle these issues one by one.

Time to Rein in the Surveillance State. NSA Surveillance: What To Watch For April 24: ACLU reply brief due in Second Circuit (ACLU v. Clapper) May 2: ACLU brief due in challenge to withholding of legal opinions authorizing bulk collection The National Security Agency's mass surveillance of American citizens has greatly expanded in the years since September 11, 2001. Recent disclosures have shown that the government is regularly tracking all of the calls of almost every ordinary American and spying on a vast but unknown number of Americans' international calls, text messages, and emails.

The government's new surveillance programs have infiltrated most of the communications technologies we have come to rely on. They are largely enabled by two problematic laws passed by Congress under a national security premise: the Patriot Act and the FISA Amendments Act (FAA).
Stop Watching Us: The Video. Why Care About the N.S.A.? - Video. » Obama NSA Nominee Defends Mass Surveillance Of Americans Alex Jones. “I believe that we need to maintain an ability to make queries of phone records”Steve WatsonInfowars.com March 11, 2014. The Top 50 Companies That Mine and Sell Your Data (and How to Opt Out)

Three steps to properly protect your personal data. With groups like Anonymous actively looking to embarrass your company, laptops thefts occurring every second, and the recent poor US District Court ruling on fifth amendment password protection rights, it is time you actually encrypt your data properly.
Justice Department Pays Linkedin $500,000 For Unlimited Access To Your Personal InformationWealthy Debates. (Elizabeth Harrington) The Justice Department is spending more than $500,000 to “enhance” its company profile on LinkedIn and increase its “brand awareness.” The contract, awarded on Christmas Eve, gives the government “unlimited access” to each of the networking site’s 250 million users through LinkedIn’s “Recruiter” service.

The DOJ’s Criminal Division, which enforces federal criminal laws, will use LinkedIn Recruiter to post job advertisements and seek out potential employees. Carahsoft Technology Corporation, a government IT company, will receive $544,338 to administer the service, according to the award.
Newly Leaked NSA Slides On PRISM Add To Confusion, Rather Than Clear It Up. Do We Have the NSA on the Run, or Is a Much Worse Surveillance State in the Making?
December 20, 2013 |
NSA seeks to build quantum computer that could crack most types of encryption. NSA US. NSA & Big Brothers, suite. NSA Devises Radio Pathway Into Computers not connected to the internet.